Sunday, October 24, 2010

Day 7 marks the mid-way point in the 13 days. At this point all the real work is done and it's just a matter of uploading. But even that takes time and it tends to be a little boring. It's sort of a marathon since I have to post every day, including weekends. As I discovered in the past, I'm uploading the evening before because it's a little easier than trying to get it all out on the same day and I have time to adjust for server problems.

Last year I was just uploading to the Podcast Ping podcast blog site and Mininova. This year I decided to upload to Demonoid and The Pirate Bay as well. In doing so I wound up uploading slightly different torrents. Since Demonoid requires an extra file that The Pirate Bay doesn't recognize for it's music torrents, I also included the show notes in the Demonoid file.

With Mininova I could use their content distribution service which meant I don't have to maintain a torrent. But Demonoid and The Pirate Bay require one, so I have to try and keep those seeded. Since the activity for those has been fairly low I probably won't bother to keep seeding much past Halloween, although I don't expect a lot of people will be trying to download from them. Mininova's structure makes it easy to find new torrents but neither The Pirate Bay nor Demonoid make the torrents as obvious.

I've also noticed far lower download numbers from Mininova for this year's show than the last. Almost all of this is due to people abandoning Mininova after it went legit last November. This discourages me from bothering to do it next year, but I don't know if I would be able to come up with enough good Halloween music for it. Even amongst non-podsafe music there really isn't a lot of Halloween music around. After Monster Mash the selection gets slim. Although this year's selection actually turned out better than last year's.

But at this point I can't say if I'll do it again or not. The lack of music would be the biggest reason, but there's also a lot of work in doing and posting them. And if I do the work I want to get enough downloads to make it seem worthwhile. It may still be worth doing a Halloween episode, and I likely will even if it turns out to be an hour long, but at this point it's not likely that I'll do another 13 days.